From the 20-23rd June, I had the chance to visit the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity held in the southern French city of Cannes. The Festival is a seven-day global event for those working in the creative communications, advertising and related fields. It is considered the largest gathering of worldwide advertising professionals, designers, digital innovators and marketers.

Each June around 15,000 registered delegates from over 100 countries visit the Festival to celebrate the best of creativity in brand communication, discuss industry issues and network with one another.

AR, VR, Data, Content Marketing were a big part of Cannes this year. There were some great activations including the opportunity to explore Mars on a school bus, as well as the opportunity to ride a surf wave or ski in the alps with Samsung’s latest VR equipment. Google seems to think that these are the technologies that will impact our lives in the next year. But can you imagine wearing a VR set and walking around the city? Steve Vranakis, chief creative director at Google said: “creatives need to distinguish between VR and YouTube 360 because they are not the same thing and creatives also need to better understand the user in order to make sure they really apply the technology and embed it properly to provide a better user-experience.”

"VR is an extremely multidisciplinary medium. It takes a lot of things for VR to work its true magic.” - Ola Björling, Global VR Director, MediaMonks. Indeed, the key message this year was that technology is no longer enough to impress humans.

In a landscape that is more competitive than ever, the talk of Cannes this year was that it now expected as a standard as part of the marketing mix that there is an AI or VR element. ‘Digital Marketing’ has almost become obsolete as a term or offering, marketing is now just ‘digital’ and is expected to be so.

Data was another big topic at Cannes this year, but what I have found is that we have a lot of tools to capture the data but we (agencies) don't develop a lot of skills to analyse the data. Wei Fei, chief creative officer at FCB China told me that "People generate the data and data is about the people and so people are important when it comes to data. Things like their behaviour, their needs, and what it makes you feel and what can you do to change that thing to solve the problem."

Haydn Sweterlitsch of HackerAgency elaborated more: "I do believe that with the speed of processing improving exponentially and with our ability to harvest data being the stuff of science-fiction, it comes down to the next step, which is that we have Big Data, we have Smart Data and the next step in the evolution is Beautiful Data. This would be data that informs you and that is digestible, and eventually becomes actionable. That to me is beautiful data and that is the future of data."

Many experts were pointing out that it would be right to consider 2016 as the year of tech education and 2017 as the year of tech application. It would be interesting to see what the reality would be like and what trends will be exposed in next year's event.

The Palais at Cannes. Snapchat was a major sponsor: Photo Copyright Navjot Singh

An England fan wearing a digital shirt. News UK transformed its super yacht the Panthalassa into a hub of event activation, with guests trying wearable tech shirts one evening while watching the football, with the T-shirts reacting to developments in the game and where guests could feel the contact of the ball on screen. Photo Copyright Navjot Singh

Cannes: Photo Copyright Navjot Singh

The main Palais at Cannes: Photo Copyright Navjot Singh

Cannes: Photo Copyright Navjot Singh

Panel discussion on ubangeas, which is a term coined in a soon-to-be-published report from Ogilvy and refers to the grand conglomeration of cities into new areas in the more ‘exotic’ parts of the world and how that is going to affect digital media and its impact on consumers and the way brands need to talk to them, work with them and be creative, particularly talking about the velocity of growth in middle classes, perhaps in countries which we have not featured so much about as business owners or marketers. The panel talk was moderated by Niall McKinney, CEO and Founder of The Knowledge Engineers (as well as being the Editor-in-Chief of 12ahead.com). The panelists were Cindy Gallop, a well-known consultant and Founder of IfWeRanTheWorld, John Gerzema (far right), an author and CEO at BAV Consulting and Justin Sturrock (second left), leads people and organization practice at PwC.

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